Workshop Misconceptions...A Draft Response...

You need to be proud of yourself, girl. You are seeing a problem with “workshop” misapplied. I see this a lot – you are wise for feeling like something was wrong.

You HAVE to have a focus on grade level instruction or your kids will fall far behind. If you are only “teaching” and giving minilessons in small groups, that’s not really what workshop is about.

When kids come to small groups the purpose is to show you how they are working through the tasks and processes so you can intervene and offer corrective support. Most of the time, small group time is not teaching time. Surprised? It’s where the kids practice what they are learning with you there to help them. You give feedback and reteach when you see them struggling. They don’t come there for a lesson, per se. They come there to practice so you can watch and see what they need. Instead, your minilesson is to the WHOLE group on GRADE level material.

Workshop is a “container of time.” You divide the time by what is important. Sometimes that shifts, depending on what kids need. It doesn’t look the same every day. Sometimes, your minilesson will take the whole period. Especially when the text may be dense or long or the process is complex.

Here’s a picture from my notebook. It was from a session I attended with Amy Rasmussen. She's a genius. 

Here’s what I recommend: Revisit what you learned from Tricia Evans: https://www.bulbapp.com/u/systems-for-the-reading-block

Then think about your classroom routines and procedures:

1. Kids come in and read. 10 Minutes. They are reading stuff they want to read, not the stuff you tell them to read. You confer. Here’s a conferring guide: https://www.bulbapp.com/u/field-guide-for-reading-conferences
2. You pull the whole class together and teach the mini-lesson about comprehension or genre. 10-15 Minutes. Use grade level, sophisticated texts.
1. Pull lessons from your textbook.
2. I’d start with Notice and Note lessons https://www.heinemann.com/products/e04693.aspx
3. or Disrupting Thinking lessons: https://www.amazon.com/Disrupting-Thinking-Why-Read-Matters/dp/1338132903
4. In this minilesson, you model how to do the comprehension work or response to literature with a text. This is where you teach your TEKS for the grade level and unit.
3. Small Group Work: 15-30 minutes. Here are some options:
1. (Most newbee workshop folks miss this part.)Then the  whole class works in collaborative, small groups to apply the work you just modeled in another text or another section of the text you modeled. You are supporting the groups and monitoring. This is where the grade level work gets done. I’d give participation/mastery type grades here.
2. Sometimes, you will need kids to be working independently to show mastery of grade level TEKS. This happens after they have had a chance to work in small groups. This is when you can take a grade.
3. Small group work is where remediation happens. In little people school, this is guided reading. In big people school, most of us favor strategy groups. You pull groups to work through a strategy that will help them with a particular need.
4. You may also choose to work with small groups on targeted skills you know they are weak on because of their data analysis. (Ask your testing coordinator for their item analysis and essays from last year’s STAAR test. You won’t really know what to teach in small groups or how to compose the small groups until you know what they need.) I would give progress/mastery grades here.
5. Students may also work in Literature Circle Groups/Clubs. You can meet with those groups too. Some of this stuff is gradable. Some of it isn’t.
6. Or you can conduct Socratic Seminars or Philosophical Chairs.
7. And/Or you can have stations that waste time and drive you nuts. Do the ones you have to for typing and Study Island. The rest of the kids need to be reading to themselves, to others, responding to text in writing, or listening to books. You can take a grade on this stuff. This is a time where they are independently applying the skills you have modeled.
4. Debrief: Last 5-7 minutes. Pull the class back together to debrief about the lesson and kids show evidence of their learning from their collaborative, small, or independent tasks. (You can take a grade here too.) This is where you decide where you need to reteach or plan deeper instruction for next steps.